China now has over half a billion Internet users

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, at the end of 2012 the population of China with access to the Internet had surpassed the half a billion mark. In total, some 513 million people now access the web in some form across China.

Even so, China’s uptake of the Internet is well below the U.S. and its only the sheer number of people there that makes the half a billion figure possible. Internet penetration in the U.S. has reached 78.2%, where as China only enjoys 38.3 percent. The rate of growth in China is also relatively slow, and last year only 28 million new people joined the web. With a population of over 1.3 billion, there’s still a lot of people still to get connected.

As in the West, there has been an explosion of growth with regards to accessing the web through mobile devices. Nearly 70% of people with web access in China use a smartphone to do so, that’s 355 million people, or 38 million more than the population of the U.S.

Regardless of how slowly new people are coming online in China, half a billion users is a tempting proposition for any company pushing online services. That’s why China is such an important market, and will continue to grow in importance in the future. There’s just too many users to ignore, especially as the wealth of the country grows.

When you consider that use of mobile devices to access the web grew 3% this year in China alone (around 1.54 million new users), it helps put into context how important both mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS have become. It also demonstrates why Microsoft is pushing hard to get Windows Phone established and winning market share.